What Film Are You Surprised Didn't Get A Sequel?
What Film Are You Surprised Didn't Get A Sequel?
Warcraft
Like the video game. It was actually a pretty good introduction to the lore, (which I only know surface level from playing the games and not digging real deep. So there may have been mistakes) and it was just about to get good, but, there just wasn't enough interest to sink more money in the franchise.
36Jonn Dies at the End
20I'll answer a slightly different question -- what film I would have liked to have had a sequel for that didn't. I don't know enough about the factors that go into deciding to fund sequels of movies.
I'd like to have had a sequel for Tora Tora Tora! doing Midway.
Tora Tora Tora! covers the attack on Pearl Harbor. It is, also in my opinion, one of the best war films out there. A lot of war films fall into a "rah rah rah good guys versus bad guys" thing; Tora Tora Tora! had both Japanese and American teams working on it and was designed for release in both countries, and was, I would say, impressively-objective. It was pretty light on actual action shots, which I think was probably reasonable -- the really critical factors were decisions made in the runup to the event, rather than the specific actions of any one person on-scene. I believe that it did do a good job of highlighting the significant factors leading to the outcome.
Looking at IMDB, a number of people seemed to feel that Tora Tora Tora! was boring. It had a lot of people talking, and not a lot of actual combat shots (and those were not high-budget, not where the money really went).
The 1976 Midway was not good.
The 2019 Midway was better, but the things that it was good at tended to be the kinds of things that Hollywood conventionally does well -- high production values, pretty lighting, lots of action shots, people being tough, etc. I was kind of irritated by the amount of coverage that John Ford got -- I appreciate that he was one of Hollywood's own, and he was in the middle of things, but he was really not very significant in the grand scheme of things. Contrast that with, say, Henry Harrison in Gettysburg, the actor who was working for the Confederate States of America, where the people making the movie enjoyed repeatedly pointing out that Harrison was an actor...but at least there, Harrison really did have a meaningful role in the battle.
It also was awfully light on a few important bits that arguably didn't reflect very well on the US. Tora Tora Tora! talks about material that was covered in analysis on what went wrong, so it doesn't shy away from that. Midway tends to gloss over some bits. It does cover some, like McClusky's error in target selection that almost caused Enterprise's strike to leave Akagi undamaged.
However, a more-serious set of issues weren't. Maybe the most-serious -- in the actual battle, one of the most-critical issues was that a significant part of the three carriers' flight groups headed off into nowhere. Partway through the flight, one of the torpedo bomber squadron commanders, Waldron, disagreed with the flight's commander, Ring, told Ring that he was flying to the wrong place, openly mutinied and ordered his squadron to disregard Ring and fly to where he thought the Japanese carriers were. This was in a strike where working together between different types of aircraft was absolutely critical and the entire operational Pacific American carrier force was at stake. That is court-martial material, and probably the only reason it didn't happen was because (a) Waldron was absolutely right, and had flown directly to the Japanese carriers, attacking without support, whereas Ring flew the rest of the planes off into nowhere and had some ditch on the way back, and (b) Waldron was killed along with all but one of his squadron when he conducted his attack solo. But then there's the question of why Ring was flying off into the middle of nowhere. I think that modern historians -- think John Parshall or the US Naval Institute -- present an extremely unflattering
picture of Mitscher, one of the carrier commanders, who likely disregarded his own actual orders from his carrier force commander, Spruance, and sent his own forces off into the middle of nowhere due to disagreeing with him. Further, it's likely that Mitscher concealed information on the situation -- a situation for which he was likely in large part responsible -- from being sent back up to higher command. While Mitscher did ultimately redeem himself, did well later in the war, this could easily have been a career-ending move, and because of that move, the battle ultimately was much more on a knife edge than it needed to be.Its focus on the action rather than the leadup to the battles and the decisions that caused various events to happen the way they do is why it can get through four entire battles -- the attack on Pearl Harbor, the subsequent American raid on the Marshalls, the Doolittle Raid, and the Battle of Midway -- in a single movie. There's enough time to cover four battles in one movie if you're heavily-weighting action shots, but you can only do that if you throw out most of the decision-making leading to those battles.
It did spend some time covering the intelligence side of Midway, which was significant, but that was only really one input into the calls that were made, and only for one of the four battles.
It's not that I don't feel that there's a place for that sort of action-oriented movie, but there are also lots of them, but very few war movies like Tora Tora Tora!
19Salt (Angelina Jolie)
I thought it was a pretty decent film..
15Flash Gordon.
14I’m way too late on this one but I’m going with Battle Angel Alita.
10I'm gonna answer a slightly different question, What film am I surprised didn't get a sequel sooner? The Incredibles. Sure, it was a self-contained story, but it could've gone anywhere after that. The last scene with the undertaker was just teasing another Incredibles adventure. But instead we just kept getting toy stories.
By the time they did announce a sequel, it had been so long that I wasn't confident that it could live up to the original - and I was pretty much right, it wasn't a bad movie but I've never felt the desire to watch it again like I have the first a few dozen times. So yeah, that's one movie where I'm like "why didn't they ever make a sequ- ... oh, that's right they did"
9The David Fincher version of Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.
7Dracula untold. Masterpiece of a movie.
3Not a film, but the series Taboo. Was crying out for it, but Tom Hardy got big after the first series.
2Buckaroo Bonzai, they even advertised it at the end of the first one.
1Any moderately successful one that people remember.
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